Does anyone happen to have an old painting program called PaintPro by Abacus (The maker of the famous series of ST books).

We got one version from a contributor but it asks for original disk at the start up, loads fine, but after trying to select tool it goes back to desktop. So there might be some sort of copy protection. TOS 1.00 US - 2.06 UK, 512k - 4mb configs tried, both Steem and Hatari gives the same result.

I found this floating around on the internet. It seems to be an earlier version with a different name. It does something similar when started. An alert appears about something on the drive, not sure what it says exactly as its French. It does not exit back to the desktop however, I can click the alert away and then a file selector appears which I can just cancel.

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Thanks for the tip. I just tried it and it behaves similar on my system. Could you try to click OK in the fileselector when it asks for "NOUVEAU.PIC" filename location. After that you should see an alert box asking for image size. After that if you click on the different tool than pencil on left does it go to desktop?

With Hatari, you could try using "--trace os_base" (or "--trace gemdos --conout 2" with older Hatari version), to see whether program outputs anything to console, whether any file accesses fail and does it terminate gracefully with pterm0().

I can load the same image, but clicking any of the tools on the left cause it to terminate without warming. I have looked at it in the dis-assembler. There's a call to Floprd() which is a good indication it's doing some sort of copy protection. Actual chunk of code from the binary below. Not exactly sure what its looking for at that sector.

It actually exits clean on purpose. I have followed the code backwards to see how it ends up at the Floprd() code I found. It is looking for something on the disk and if not found, it sets a flag. This flag is then checked later in the event loop when you click on stuff. If it did not find what its was looking for during its startup phase you get the little surprise exit when you try to do certain things. I have patched the older copy I found such that it thinks the copy protection test has succeeded and thus the message about inserting the disk is gone. The tool window works now too.

Attached is the modified PlusPaint ST I patched. It won't ask for the disk anymore. It will still open the file selector, either cancel it or hit ok and then later when you go to save you can change the path. I also made a copy of the the medium resolution rsc file and renamed it such that it will run in ST low. The menu bar will be a little messed up, but it works enough to test it.

I deleted the sample images to make enough room for the patched version and the extra rsc file. Run file "PLUSPNTP.PRG".

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